luck & hope
by nagito
Summary: Komaeda never doubted his luck. Even for a second. / Oneshot. Free-time events spoilers.


**-luck & hope-**

* * *

The day he lost his parents was the day he realized that the world wasn't as kind as they had made it out to be for him. Their promises of giving him a future, their promises of making him happy, they were nothing but assumptions on how his luck would play out. This was something he figured out as he sat at the hospital, being examined by doctors who all said the same thing: that it was a miracle that he was alive. That he was, indeed, very lucky.

This single thought became the center of his morals. The very center of what held his mind together like paste on paper.

A few days after the incident, when the hospital finally let him go and a family member- his aunt, one of the only other relatives his parents had- came to pick him up from San Cristobal, he was met with looks of sadness and pity. He didn't say a word. He didn't tell her about how he had fully come to terms with his parents dying, how he had understood how his parents simply succumbed to the way the world worked. It was just bad luck on their part, right? Maybe to other kids it would be the saddest thing to lose one's parents, but not to him.

He knew how things worked.

Sure, he was sad. Sad and lonely, but it wasn't anything he couldn't get over. His lack of tears got his aunt and uncle to look at him with strange looks in their eyes, and it was at that time when they all started to talk about how, perhaps, there was something wrong with him.

They didn't understand. Couldn't understand. They were oblivious to how the world around them was working on good and bad luck.

His classmates at his new school treated him like an outcast, and what was left of his family kept their distance. He did poorly in school, too, and his family would oftentimes rat him out for it. He was considered the problem child, and on a daily basis he was thrown into a separate room and denied meals. Despite this daily cycle he continued to smile. He smiled through the teasing, through the mud puddles he's shoved into and food pieces thrown his way; he smiled through the hours he spent in the basement of the house, happily writing away as he did his homework under the dim, flickering lights.

There were still things to look forward to, after all! Like the lunch he gets to eat at school, or the baths he gets to take at that public bathhouse on the way home (He made it a habit to drop by before reaching the house. The old man there gave him a discount, too). This was when he learned to find hope even in the deepest of despair, and that luck will soon turn around when it finds it fit.

/

It was around 4 months after the incident at San Cristobal when the house burned down. It took his aunt and uncle with it, and with that he was left with no other relatives. He considered it as good luck, though. He wouldn't be able to access his parent's money until he became 16, so he was left with no other choice than to live in an orphanage until then, but with that he was able to live with a loving caretaker and children who treated him with kindness. He moved schools, too, and there he managed to make a few friends.

He was well aware of how, at some point, all of this would turn around. That he shouldn't become to comfortable before bad luck whisks him away into another period of despair, but he mentally conditioned himself for that. When that happens, he will press on and keep on hanging on to hope. He still saw elements of good and bad luck throughout his daily life, of course. Despite the few friends he had made he still had to go through bullying, but that bad luck would then be followed by good luck, and more things of similar nature would continue to happen in his life.

To him, all of this simply proved his belief; the belief that the balance of the world was hanging on slipping scales of good and bad luck, and that it would simply shift towards one or the other when it saw it fit. It was always the same after all, good luck will always be preceded by an equal amount of bad luck, and this became a prominent 'law' in his life that he chose to accept despite the weird looks his classmates would give him when he'd start talking about it.

Then the kidnapping happened. It scared him to no end and caused enough trauma for him to need psychiatric treatment, but on the upside he won the lottery and managed to get enough money to live on his own. This all happened when he was 12 years old.

He left a third of what he won with the orphanage.

/

When he was old enough to gain access to his inheritance, that was when he received the diagnosis. Stage 3 malignant lymphoma and concurrent frontotemporal dementia, the doctor said. He sat there in the clinic staring into space for a while, the doctor whispering apologies and offering him several treatments for the lymphoma, at least, but he declined. Instead, he laughed it off and thanked the doctor for letting him know, leaving the clinic with looks of concern and pity from everyone there to witness it.

He returned home to find the letter in the mailbox.

Sitting in the apartment's living room, he stared down at the words "Hope's Peak" with gleaming eyes. He's read about the school before, looked it up and learned to admire it with every fiber of his being, students and teachers and all. It's become something of an obsession, actually, and it was the greatest honor to have gotten an invitation.

He never expected the luck that would follow that bleak diagnosis would end up as this. Without any hesitation, he accepted right away. The excitement ran through his veins, and with that letter came newfound hope. Sure, it was nothing but luck that got him there, but the hope it gave him was enough for him to throw away all of his negative thoughts out the window.

Komaeda never doubted his luck. Even for a second.


End file.
